[j2kun]

Not all schools are like that. My alma mater had no research program, and all the professors did was teach. Though the student body was largely comprised of partiers, so you may have gotten the same sort of treatment.

That being said, it sounds like you're a proponent of the "alternative routes" that the OP suggests at the end of the article.

[Scienz]

I am indeed a huge proponent of the alternative routes method. My criticisms of higher education could go on for a long time, and I'm not even going to try and list them all here. My experience has also been that professors who also do research are not nearly as good teachers as the ones who don't. The best teachers I had were in community college, despite probably not being as "qualified" or well-versed in the subjects as the ones publishing papers, a good number of them actually cared about the students and went out of their way to help you get through the class. Counterintuitively, it seems the more prestigious the school the more self-centered and hostile the professors.

[j2kun]

This is true. In research communities they actively tell graduate students not to care about teaching because it looks bad on a CV to have teaching awards, etc.